How to solder Guide (PCB edition!)

Tech Talk
41

i know how ya feel
it took me a good hour to get all the wires soldered onto the Madcatz board… then during play over 2 days 4 wires popped out, luckily i anticipated it and kept my soldering gun at hand for just such occasions

42

Excellent write up. Especially useful for people like me who have no experience with working on electronics.

I have a general understanding of wiring and soldering, but is there another guide that will explain each part and their function?
I mean like the parts required to lets say, make a hacked pad work for a arcade stick.

I look at some of these diagrams and I see the wires, joysticks, buttons, but I see other parts I don’t understand.

Lastly, can you solder two different wires on one contact at once? I ask because I have a MAS stick and i want to do dual PCB setup, for DC & PS2.

43

I had to scrap my cheap madcatz harness and I had some questions. I have a Sanwa 5 Pin Harness to solder onto the pins themselves.

  1. What is the correct wire to pin connection? (Blk, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow…left to right, or right to left).

  2. With the JLF’s pins already rotated like the JLF in the TE stick, should the connection to the JLF itself (the plastic end with wires coming out) be where you can see the 5 indents showing?

  3. Is the best way to solder onto the left of the pins? back? front?

Thanks for any help at all!!!

44

This is a very n00by question, but here goes:

How easy is it to fuck up a PCB while soldering? From what I’m reading it sounds like it’s not something that would happen if you are being relatively careful, but I want to get clarification before I get brave enough to try some of this stuff.

45

Sorry to bump an old thread.

I bought some 30 gauge wire and they are thin as hair.

How do I cut it to expose the tip of the copper wire?

Thanks

46

Wire stripper that is able to do 30 AWG.
I have that does 22-30 AWG for Solid, 24-32 AWG for Stranded.

47

I have one just like that! :open_mouth:

48

Thanks for the awesome post.

Can you talk more about the scraping off of the fugly black stuff? I’ve soldered to a ton of things but can’t seem to get the correct amount of scraping to get solder to stick under the fugly black stuff. I can hit the alternative points but would really like to know how to solder to defulglied pads. I’m specifically working on xBox1’s.